WHEN Admiral Zheng He led his fleet out of the eastern Chinese port of Suzhou in 1405, it must have been a sight to behold. The largest of the several hundred ships under his command were the size of modern aircraft carriers and housed 500 men apiece. The fleet made seven expeditions in all, to advertise the might of the Ming dynasty around the Indian Ocean, but having returned to port for the last time it was dismantled, vanishing along with the engineering know-how that created it. For the next few centuries China's seagoing vessel of choice was a much humbler junk.

It seems incredible that such an impressive, and effective, body of knowledge could have disappeared like that, yet history is full of such examples. When archaeologists began excavating at Pompeii in the 18th century, they uncovered remains of a Roman aqueduct system that was more sophisticated than the one in use at the time. The Egyptian pyramids still haven't given up all their construction secrets. And going even further back, finds at Howieson's Poort Shelter in South Africa indicate that people were making highly sophisticated stone tools there until about 60,000 years ago when, for reasons unknown, they reverted to producing much simpler ones.

We tend to think of technological evolution as an exponential curve that starts out more-or-less flat in the early Stone Age and accelerates towards the present. But the idea that we are becoming ever more inventive may be an illusion. Looked at under the magnifying glass, the apparently smooth curve breaks up into a frenetic series of advances, retreats and new advances - what Peter Richerson, who studies cultural evolution at the University of California, Davis, describes as evolution "noodling about". In fact, over the whole of human history, we have probably lost more innovations than we now possess, says anthropologist Luke Premo at Washington State University in Pullman.

It is a sobering thought. Just when we were pinning our hopes on producing hi-tech fixes for today's problems - climate change, overpopulation, emerging infectious diseases and so on - comes the news that we are not advancing inexorably towards technological Nirvana after all. Nevertheless, a better understanding of how technologies evolve could hold some valuable lessons for the future. In building a more fine-grained picture of human technological history, we may identify clues as to what will work and what will not.

One of the long-standing mysteries of human technological evolution is why our Stone Age ancestors apparently showed so little inventiveness in their toolmaking. The oldest tools discovered to date are 2.6 million-year-old stone flakes in what is now Ethiopia. They mark the beginning of a refining process that didn't culminate in really effective stone hand axes until about 2 million years later. This slow progress, the flat part of the technological evolution curve, has been put down to the limited cognitive abilities of early hominins. Unable to learn from previous generations, each one had to start again from scratch, which explains why they lacked so-called cumulative culture.

Generally considered to be what separates humans from other primates, cumulative culture rests on two key skills: social learning, which is the transmission of knowledge to new members of a group, and over-imitation - the high-fidelity copying of a behaviour, including irrelevant or incidental elements, which allows the behaviour and its context to be passed along together. Some researchers have argued that cumulative culture only made its appearance around 100,000 years ago, with Homo sapiens (New Scientist, 24 March, p 34). But anthropologist and stone-tool expert Dietrich Stout of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has challenged that view.

Innovation tends to happen by the introduction, deliberate or otherwise, of copying errors - the equivalent of genetic mutations in biological evolution - with those that provide an adaptive advantage being more likely to be passed on. Early humans might well have had what it takes cognitively to learn from their forebears, Stout argues, it is just that with the simple tools at their disposal, there wasn't much room for copying error (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 366, p 1050). Put simply, he says, "you can't change much about a hand axe if you still want it to perform all the functions that a hand axe performs". However, as tool complexity increased, the potential for innovation grew.

Premo suggests another reason why Stone Agers' creativity may have been underestimated. Throughout those apparently uneventful 2 million years, they were hunter-gatherers who lived in extended, itinerant family groups of between 20 and 40 adults, plus children. "These small groups could have been exposed to fairly high chances of the whole group going extinct," he says, whether because their best hunter was incapacitated due to illness or injury, or because environmental conditions changed rapidly. When a local population died out, all its innovations would have died with it, and sometimes that could have meant the loss of generations' worth of know-how.

In 2010, with anthropologist Steven Kuhn of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Premo developed a computer model that recapitulated the behaviour of innovative, tool-using hominin groups in a Stone Age landscape. It showed that a period of technological innovation followed by the wiping out of the innovators and their kin looks identical, on the broad scale, to a period of technological stasis (PLoS One, vol 5, p e15582).

But if Stone Age toolmakers were innovating, then where is the evidence? The archaeological record is notoriously patchy and the further back you go the sparser it becomes. Even so, the apparent lack of progress may be partly explained by the timeframe we choose to consider. In soon-to-be-published work, Charles Perreault at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico gathered information about 500 archaeological samples - tools, pots and other artefacts dating from the past 10,000 years and coming mainly from North America - and analysed how they changed over time. He found that the rate of change depended on the period over which he calculated it, appearing to be rapid over short time periods and slower over longer ones. A key reason for this is that there are many advances and retreats over the shorter term that tend to cancel each other out in the longer timeframe.

There is an intriguing parallel here with biological evolution. Back in 1983, University of Michigan palaeontologist Philip Gingerich studied how shape and structure changed over millions of years in a wide range of animals. He, too, found an inverse relationship between rate of change and period of measurement and, like Perreault, concluded that this is simply an illusion of perspective (Science, vol 222, p 159). The main difference between the two studies is that, by Perreault's calculations, technological change happens approximately 50 times faster than morphological change.

As well as challenging preconceptions about the inventiveness of our Stone Age ancestors, these findings have also fuelled a growing realisation that technological innovations are highly prone to extinction. Premo and Kuhn's model hinted that there are many reasons why even seemingly clever inventions don't catch on, or die out. In the real world, a classic example can be found on the island of Tasmania. About 12,000 years ago, as temperatures and sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age, Tasmania was cut off from the Australian mainland and its inhabitants marooned. Archaeological evidence shows that until the land bridge was severed, Tasmanians possessed a range of complex technologies, including cold-weather clothing, fishing nets, spears and boomerangs. When Europeans arrived 10 millennia later, almost nothing remained. They found people whose technology was the simplest of any known contemporary human group.

Low population density and fragile networks for knowledge transfer were the main reasons for this loss, according to Stephen Shennan, director of University College London's Institute of Archaeology. He notes, though, that in other places and eras different influences have been at play. For example, market forces and political or social factors can dictate rates of innovation. A wealthy elite may be essential to sustain a community of craftspeople who need a long training period to learn to make the artefacts the elite desires. Patents, in the modern sense of the word, were invented in the 15th century, before which craftspeople found other ways to profit from their knowledge for as long as possible - ways that influenced the development of the technologies in question. Guilds emerged to protect skilled knowledge, for example, keeping the price high but the pool of knowledge transmitters small, and hence vulnerable to extinction if conditions changed.

Factors intrinsic to a technology may also determine its evolution. An example of this is found in Japanese katana or samurai swords, which remained unchanged for centuries because errors in forging the blades became too costly, discouraging experimentation. "We tend not to consider cost-benefit ratios," says Shennan, but they can be crucial. "Something that seems like a thoroughly useful innovation may actually disappear because of the costs associated with it." Conversely, a technology may spread at the expense of better alternatives because once established it is too expensive to change tack. An example is the QWERTY keyboard, which is slower to type on than other keyboard layouts, but continues to monopolise the keyboard market in English speaking parts of the world.

Rumour and gossip can shape the trajectory of a technology too. In the past, using a new tool or medicinal herb might have got you branded as a witch, encouraging people to hide or suppress discoveries. Religious institutions still have a special kind of power: by attaching moral or spiritual value to an innovation, they can usher it in, by denouncing it they can prevent its spread.

So, what of the future? Are things different now, enabling technological evolution to continue at an ever-faster pace? Because of the sheer numbers of us on the planet, sparse populations and fragile transmission networks no longer pose a serious threat to innovation. Besides, since the invention of writing, we have been able to store knowledge outside people's heads and disseminate it widely. But we may have unwittingly introduced other brakes on progress.

According to Alex Mesoudi, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Durham, UK, technological progress - as measured by indicators such as the rate of scientific publication and patents filed - has indeed been accelerating exponentially over the past few centuries, but is now showing signs of slowing. The trouble, he says, is that we have accumulated so much knowledge, that young people now spend proportionately more time learning from previous generations and less time innovating. Schoolchildren and students tend to learn a subject in the order that it developed historically. For example, physics undergraduates are tested on their grasp of pre-1900 discoveries. "Only at master's level do they start learning 20th-century stuff," he says. And that lag is having an impact.

In a paper published last year, Mesoudi pointed out that the mean age at which Nobel prizewinners made their prizewinning discovery, or inventors came up with inventions that were considered worthy of entry in prominent technological almanacs, increased from 32 in 1900 to 38 a century later. It is in this period that he found a decrease in overall rates of innovation (PLoS One, vol 6, p e18239). "There is some evidence that fields are slowing down," he says.

Something else is happening too. As technologies become more complex, the associated contextual or causal knowledge is being lost. People who build cars today do not necessarily understand how a car works, for example, since they may just assemble one part or operate a robot that does it for them. In Fiji, where houses have to withstand hurricanes, anthropologist Robert Boyd of Arizona State University in Tempe has found that locals have a pretty good grasp of why certain materials are better at withstanding hurricanes, but not why certain structural designs work and others do not. "Causal understanding is a very powerful and beneficial thing," he says. "If you are put in a different situation, due to environmental change, say, you can adapt much more quickly if you understand how a technology works than if you have to adapt as a population by trial and error."

It is not yet clear how much of a problem this is, since the information tends to be recorded and the body of people who do understand it, while relatively small, is probably still large enough to ensure preservation. In publishing his findings, Mesoudi intended to be provocative rather than pessimistic. He wanted to make people think about how ever-adaptable humans are adapting to the new problems that technological prowess presents. He suggests, for example, that one way we are overcoming the problem of that long learning period is through the collectivisation of science. What used to be a predominantly individual activity is now increasingly the occupation of groups who pool their knowledge. And there are potential benefits if it allows us to harness the power of the hive mind.

Mesoudi hopes that by building such adaptations into models of technological evolution, researchers will be able to make more accurate predictions and identify the factors that predispose an innovation to success or failure. Not all those factors will be under the control of innovators. Nevertheless, with better insight, they may at least be able to minimise the likelihood of repeating the experience of poor Zheng He, who lost the greatest fleet the world had ever seen.

Laura Spinney is a writer based in Lausanne, Switzerland

ooOJMOOo _____________________________ No matter how cynical I become, it never seems enough to keep up. - Lilly Tomlin

FM,
In his book Beyond Freedom And Dignity behavior researcher B.F. Skinner (or whoever wrote the foreword) observed that each new technological "solution" becomes the basis for the next new suite of needed technological solutions.
The automobile got the horse %^$ off the streets. But the unadorned internal combustion engine became such a detrimental pollution source, we had to add catalytic converter, oxygen sensors, mass airflow meters, etc.

"Something else is happening too. As technologies become more complex, the associated contextual or causal knowledge is being lost. People who build cars today do not necessarily understand how a car works, for example, since they may just assemble one part or operate a robot that does it for them." Sinney / FM

But this is the way division of labor works.

It's the genius of specialization.
The best automotive designer in the world need not be a licensed driver. A talented architect need not own a hammer or a carpenter's square.

If Spinney's intended point is that at some level of specialization, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards; I think not ...

UNLESS

a cataclysm occurs to collapse the system; for example, a plague that kills 90% of Earth's population in 60 days.
But as long as the system continues to grow, I don't see any intrinsic limit on specialization. There are medical specialties today that didn't exist a few centuries ago. There was a time in Earth's history when barbers were also surgeons. They were the only ones in town with tools sharp enough to do the cutting.

Different story these days.
I hope I haven't missed your point, & Spinney's here FM.

Well, first please note that Spinney's article discusses a 2.6 million year time span. I'm not sure I've caught every point she was making, but I do see these:

1. Technological progress is neither inexorable nor irreversable.2. Historically many factors have led to major technological setbacks. We likely don't know all of those factors. However, the historically recent trend toward specialization seems to shut out potential contributors.3. We see some current trends that need attention and investigation. For example, there are signs that technological progress is slowing down.4. While continued tecnological progress certainly seems with us and the possibilities (e.g., The Singularity) are sometimes mind-boggling, betting everything on that course is nonetheless very poor risk management, at least at this stage of our knowledge.

ooOJMOOo _____________________________ No matter how cynical I become, it never seems enough to keep up. - Lilly Tomlin

For most of Earth's history, biological evolution has been steady, but v e e e r r y y gradual.

We, by fabulous circumstance; are among those very few human generations that occupy the elbow of the curve.

Most of our great-grandfathers lived lives much as their great-grandfathers lived before them.
But we as children lead lives that our great-grandchildren might not recognize.

Look at how much humanity has accomplished in just a few centuries.

The Industrial Revolution transformed manufacturing. Imagine. The U.S. Revolution was fought with muzzle-loading firearms whose parts were not interchangeable, one to another.
Industrial standardization changed all that.
Edison not merely invented the light bulb. He and Hank Ford made it practical to run a factory for 3 shifts, instead of one. It virtually tripled plant productivity, with nowhere near a tripling of plant costs.
Profits skyrocketed, and humanity claimed the 24 hour day.
There were humans born that saw horse drawn firefighting equipment in their youth, that lived to see a human set foot on the moon!
Astounding!
And though it's surely a simple matter to imagine a dozen scenarios that could drive us back to the stone age; the progress explosion of the past century or two are absolutely unprecedented.

People used to shiver in the Winter. We walk to the wall, twist a little dial, and the furnace makes us toasty warm.

Then unanswered question here is whether we'll destroy ourselves, through aggression or stupidity, before we graduate to the 5th stage.
Too soon to tell. But the Bills game is on the DVR. I'll have a look. I don't have to drive to the stadium in my luxurious metal box on wheels.
I can simply flip a switch, and watch the game, expertly covered, on my magic window on the world; an HDTV resolution 1920 X 1080 resolution computer monitor.

From Sear:Then unanswered question here is whether we'll destroy ourselves, through aggression or stupidity, before we graduate to the 5th stage.Too soon to tell. But the Bills game is on the DVR. I'll have a look. I don't have to drive to the stadium in my luxurious metal box on wheels.I can simply flip a switch, and watch the game, expertly covered, on my magic window on the world; an HDTV resolution 1920 X 1080 resolution computer monitor.

This becomes the dilema of consequence, should the electronics age fail, should our demand for electrical power outstrip the fuels to feed it, if or when the system shuts off what will our decendants do, could they possibly maintain or will they revert instead of advance. In other words is the way of life, the way of evolution cohesive?

The price we pay for petroleum products is an energy bargain; mainly because our refineries are highly industrialized, and the economy of scale is working overtime.

But energy slowly collected photosynthetically over geological time periods is being consumed in decades.

I live 30 miles from town.
When the store is literally across the street, I can just grab my change purse, stagger across the street, and buy a bar of soap, or whatever.
If I've forgotten something, toothpicks, or shaving cream, I can return to the store, and chalk it up to exercise.

When a jaunt to the store is a 60 mile round trip, I use a shopping list (3X5 file card) in shirt pocket. If it's not on the list, I don't get it.

In a few hundred years, only wealthy people, subsistence farmers, cyber-workers, and the self-employed will be able to live in the country like this.

It very well may require a redesign of our culture.
Prince Charles is already working on this. But he's taking baby steps, perhaps suited to the U.K.

In any case, I'm nearly 60. My car can get 40 MPG

it's small by U.S. standards, but I can easily fit a month's worth of supplies in it, with room to spare.

And instead of living in 2,400 square foot homes, they may have to live in 1,000 square foot homes; and instead of in States that border Canada, in States that border Mexico.

They will adapt, or they will die.

PS
Current U.S. culture depends upon abundant cheap energy, and agribidness.
How will a farmer plow and tend 3,000 acres in Kansas, without diesel fuel?
Diesel is ideally suited to such high horsepower an undertaking. The energy density in BTU per pound, of diesel fuel is many times that of the most powerful electric battery.
Electric tractors ain't gunna cut it.

We're already over-fishing our oceans, and we may already have caused the extinction of some types of salmon; due to dam construction blocking their spawning grounds, or over-fishing them otherwise.

I can easily imagine food riots, and wide-spread famine.

But not today. Me furrowing my brow about it today won't help them in Y2350.
So sadly, all I can do is what I've been doing. I live conservatively, heat my home with wood, keep my commercial electric bill to about $30.oo / month, drive a 4 cyl. car, and a 1 cyl. motorcycle (I've gotten over 90 MPG w/ that, but it's a lot more fun to get 60 MPG).

When you suffer, you should examine whether you can do anything about it. If you can, there is no need to worry. If you can not, there is also no need to worry.

While continued tecnological progress certainly seems with us and the possibilities (e.g., The Singularity) are sometimes mind-boggling, betting everything on that course is nonetheless very poor risk management, at least at this stage of our knowledge.

i agree. i don't think our growing dependence on technology is necessarily wise. there are so many ways it could go wrong in a drastic way that could send us all back to the stone age...or worse. we simply don't know the risks, and we've been lucky thus far...though some of the newer technologies continue to raise the level of risk. but i do see the increase in dependence on technology as unavoidable...inevitable. we're in a very vulnerable state right now...the next several hundred years will see the transition from relatively vulnerable biological creatures to far more robust combinations of genetics and artificial limbs / bodies.

i still don't think we're really confronting where all this appears to be headed...it may lead to our own voluntary extinction within only a few tens of thousands of years. but right now, there's so much fun in the discovery, and the consequences are so remote and far off into the future, that we simply cannot stop ourselves.

it's entirely possible that we're living in one of the best of times overall right now. and entirely possible we won't appreciate just how good it was until 10,000 years from now.

we may well one day long for the ignorance we once had...because it made the world exciting, full of discovery, full of things to be experienced as only a fragile, conscious biological organism can experience them.

don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone...

And if we lived in an authoritarian State, where our central planning politburo was dictating to us that we must do so, it might be unwise.

But semiconductor technology proliferates in large part because we voluntarily, of free will, in inadequately regulated markets; opt to buy it.
I've never seen a U.S. government edict ordering us to buy a iPod, or the latest iPhone, or any of the rest of it.

"it's entirely possible that we're living in one of the best of times overall right now." NT

I regard this as a certitude.
There may be a titanic breakthrough in the future, that will make our lifestyles look barbaric in comparison.

BUT!!

Consider what life was like for King Henry VIII.
His castle had woolen wall hangings, a feeble stab at insulation.
Not only do we have central heat that can maintain a 100 degree temperature differential (thirty below zeroF outside, 70F inside).
We've got central airconditioning too. It not only keeps us cool on sweltering days. It even sucks the humidity out of the air for us, so we're cool, and dry.

Try riding 10 miles in a horse drawn carriage, over poorly paved roads.
Hank 8 would have paid a king's ransom for a nice little SUV! They're vastly more comfortable, quieter, smoother, four times as fast, and they don't require a dozen attendants to mend the reins, the carriage, shovel the stable, keep the horses shod, etc.

Our binge on cheap energy is irresponsible.
But no leader has the onions to dial back our reckless consumption.

PS
It's amazing how much we take for granted. The king's finest clothing may have been woven from expensive textiles, silk perhaps.

But I think 65% poly 35% cotton is nicer. Our machine woven textiles are finer, more uniform, more precise.
Our technology is advanced, so we can have a comfortable crew neck T-shirt. Lord knows what Hank8 wore instead.

The Hankster had to deal with a bed pan. We've got the miracle and convenience of a flush toilet, and running water, and mass produced bars of soap, or convenient liquid soap with pump dispenser.

If Hank8 wanted to light a Tiparillo, he'd need a tinder box, or a hot coal from the fireplace.
We can just flick a Bic; convenience fit for a King! It's instant fire, from a bauble that doesn't make a shirt pocket bulge.
To Hank8 that would have been a miracle.

I can only guess what a king of his era would have paid for a comfortable pair of cross-training gym shoes, and a pair of tube socks to match.

We have soooooo much; and take so much for granted. COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS! Or die an ingrate.

So your stand is that technology can and will solve any problem. So such strategies as conservation, avoidance, sanitation, etcetera are necessary only as stopgaps?

not sure specifically who you're referring to here. in my addled mind, conservation, recycling, sanitation are all technologies in themselves. in that respect, one technology can mitigate problems caused by another technology...but it makes me nervous to rely on a future technological development to fix a problem caused by a current technology...such as relying on the possibility of developing a better way to handle nuclear waste...giving us permission to generate waste on the premise that a future technology will make the problem go away. i think that's very risky...but it could be argued that we're nearing a stage in our understanding of physics that making such a leap may not be as risky as it once was. the ability to manipulate matter on a molecular and atomic scale means that problems caused by molecules and atoms are no longer as insurmountable as once thought. this becomes an engineering problem rather than requiring some new breakthrough in basic understanding.

but we're at a pretty vulnerable stage right now. we haven't yet mastered nano-technology, micro-electronics, or genetic engineering to a high enough degree to have full confidence that we can always engineer a solution. and the technologies themselves can potentially create runaway problems that could grow faster than we can mitigate them...or potentially remain hidden or undetected until it becomes too big a problem to solve.

clearly, i'm no luddite. but, just as clearly, if we don't proceed with caution, we could cause our own premature extinction.

Hmmmmmm...... I think the term "technology" refers to an understanding of the elements of existence in a particular realm such that we can adequately address and control behavior in that realm. So there's a "technology" involved in our use of computer chips, weather, psychology, farming, economics and so on. (That may seem a bit broad; I mean it to be.)

Historically there have been dangers in relying solely on technology to solve problems. Sometimes the perceived and necessary understanding has been illusionary. Sometimes the necessary technology has been late in arriving. And sometimes it turned out the problem itself was misunderstood. The result is a history fraught with mishaps, sometimes humorous and sometimes tragic.

We now live in a world wherein there are some technological mishaps that could threaten the welfare of large populations and even life on the planet. Fortunately there's a management "technology" called "Risk Management" that tells us how to address such potential disasters. The management team looks at desired out comes and the plans for achieving those outcomes and asks "what could go wrong?" It then lists all such events, ills, non-performances, etcetera and makes up comprehensive plans for addressing those bad situations, "glitches" if you will. One possible glitch is that the pursued technology won't fix the problem in time.

BTW, this "Risk Management" approach saved many thousands of lives in the WTC on 9/11.

ooOJMOOo _____________________________ No matter how cynical I become, it never seems enough to keep up. - Lilly Tomlin

There is another factor here too. This same technology has also led to sophisticated information manipulation techniques which may act to neutralise accurate risk management assessments. I am thinking in particular about GM foods.and deepwater oil exploration/extraction etc.

"I was responding to Sear's posts."
"So your stand is that technology can and will solve any problem." FM

You rather more have it backward; my fault. I've re-read mine; confusing.

sear previously posted:

"each new technological "solution" becomes the basis for the next new suite of needed technological solutions." [meaning "problems that need to be solved", and we often as not turn to technology for that.]

The other half of this progression to the terminal future is, we'll either adapt, or die.
Adapt doesn't necessarily mean create a new technological solution.
Once the petroleum is gone, we may go back to using whale oil to light our lamps.
I can easily imagine returning to horse-based transport, for some limited environments, the suburban fringes of mega-cities for example. States may require that horses on public roadways wear diapers, or whatever.

FM, thanks for offering to define terms; always a good idea in such exchange.
Here's another def., a little more formal.

technology (tèk-nòl´e-jê) noun
plural technologies
Abbr. technol.
1.a. The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives. b. The scientific method and material used to achieve a commercial or industrial objective.
2.Anthropology. The body of knowledge available to a civilization that is of use in fashioning implements, practicing manual arts and skills, and extracting or collecting materials.

In time passed we utilized the inventiveness of the human mind during the act of aggression to develop new skills/machines/technique to wage battle on the other, during those troubled times we developed the industrial revolution to competitively build and quantitatively build machines of destruction, this is where the steam engine took over from sail, the oil boiler from coal and nuclear from oil. The ability to mass produce became the need for war in the Revolution, the War of 1812, US Civil, Spanish American, WWI and WWII so too our manufacturing developed to better deliver the machines of death/protection, we had to outgun, out produce, out techno the enemy or lose the wars, the mass produced automobile and our dependency on oil came from here.

Here we stand on new territory ground, the microchip was developed to minimize/accurize the machines of warfare, it spread into everyday life and lifestyle, the electronics age has amassed a need within the human to be interdependent for communications, purchases, information and general distraction, we enjoy many of those very bases here on this board. The advent of the interdependency we do not accept as a norm in the "older" generations is typical of a next or "Y" generation, the techno-geeks are so dependent on the infrastructure so as to not be functional in a non-electronic realm. I have witnessed the occurence during scouting trips to our farm with the troop of our nephews, we had zero phone signal in the hills, we would scour for that region to establish camp, we allowed no electronic devices save a flashlight and to use those only in dire need. There were boys and a few adults that could not/would not cope and would demand to leave or did leave as they felt "too disconnected", all so many of the newbies where I work cannot leave a cell phone sit for more than a few minutes prior to a quick text or a tweet, our computer system is not a open system as we enjoy here, the IT department routinely blocks sites or systems additions that can interfere with a days work, the level of discipline up to discharge for attempting the act of bypassing the safeguards has occurred over and over with lack of concern or the intent to prove the individual can do this without being caught ever continueing from the need to be 'connected' is amazing to me. Part of my love of motorcycling is that disconnect(albeit short term) to cell phone, GPS, radio(even as the bike has one), not be caged in a box on four wheels released from weather restraint, with the wind in my hair and my skills to drive at my hands and feet.

We are at a crossroads, we must maintain the level of electrical production or expand it to cover for a self inflicted need to be dependent on electronics, the ever increasing desire to devlop electro mechanical methods to avert human physical labor and the need for more human soft comforts even at work has developed its own life. The crossroad is to continue down this avenue potentially to achieve the next level of human/machine interconnectivity, there is also that point that could cause our conversion into machine and/or our demise on this path where we cannot maintain nor sustain with the return from where we came no longer possible and we die out; the other path is to learn to accept a level of these gizmos, to live in a use but not a need for them where should we lose them we can revert to a earlier time lifestyle and redirect from there to survive yet another day.

c5,
I'm not quite sure where you're going with all that.
If your concern is, will we still depend upon high-tech in a post-apocalyptic world, I gather the answer is, not for long.
I spent decades in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, both in conventional production, and in development.
Semiconductor production is not suited to radioactive ruins. They'll use flashlights until the battery runs down.

Main path I was aiming for was the inability of current generation to deal with the world without electronics or electricity. May come a day without either and sooner than many conceive. Only takes one severe solar flare to hit our little rock head on and the entire grid will be down for a long time. Utilities are "hardening" their systems but most concede it will be for little advantage should a big event hit us directly. No phones, no TV, limited radio, minimal cars if the radiation surge does become severe enough will take out the electronics hardware, no computer systems with the net satelites cooked.

c5,
I hope you've exaggerated the worst case scenario a bit.
For one thing, a direct hit from a mega-solar flare would only strike half the planet, the hemisphere of the planet facing the flare.
The hemisphere in solar shadow (night) would be shielded by the planet itself, I suspect.

Our satellites are vulnerable.
Our electronics are vulnerable. If your house has aluminum siding and metal roof, ground both and you may be OK.
And if past history is any indication, such event is likely to be rare.
So while a concern, I wouldn't lose much sleep over it. If you get a news flash a flare is on the way, wrap your unplugged electronics in two grounded layers of aluminum foil, and have a low tech "solar flare" party.

i read a book..."earth abides"...sheesh, gotta be 40 years ago...about a plague that wipes out most of the population...and how those who were left pretty quickly and unavoidably regressed to pretty primitive living standards...no one to run the power plants...no one to teach anyone else how to do it...because the entire educational system collapsed, and there were too few people left to keep it all going. difficult even to teach people to read...especially those who couldn't read all that well to begin with.

an appropriately sized natural catastrophe, or a couple in quick succession, a wayward virus, or a good-sized asteroid hit (i think the estimate is that 90% of those with even relatively remote chances of hitting the earth have been found...but that leaves 10%), a gamma-ray burst...or one of man's creations with unintended side effects...could well kill billions...could set the entire planet back centuries...even millenia.

wouldn't take long to get low-tech again...but there would still be a need to kill...as quickly and with as much advantage as possible...and that will drive innovation...climbing up the technological ladder once again.

I absolutely agree. At some level of cataclysm, there wouldn't be enough survivors to maintain the current system, which depends upon division of labor to function.
When everyone is a generalist, everyone makes their own shoes, their own shawls, their own spear points, society doesn't progress very far.

But when one person asks: "You want fries with that?" for a living, and the next person simply flips the burgers, and the next person runs the cash register, economy of scale makes the enterprise more profitable.

Regarding Sci-Fi:
When it's the Israelis and the Palestinians, we seem to harbor our pre-existing prejudice.
When it's the Kardasians* and the Ferengi, we can see such disputes in less prejudiced light.

* The Star Trek race with two spines, not the Earthlings with big butts.